The Fine Art of Car Bombings

By AMEI WALLACH

Published: June 20, 2004

WALID RAAD was 15 in 1983 when his family shipped him out of Beirut to Boston, just ahead of the militias that were targeting teenage men for enlistment during one of the most violent periods of the Lebanese wars. Now, in his art, he explores the inner life of hostages, the aftereffects of car bombings and the disconnect between official promises and how secure people feel.

If all that seems newly relevant to us in the age of terror, Mr. Raad would not disagree. "Why wouldn't you ask somebody from Lebanon about these experiences?" he asks. "We've lived through so many of these events, we can prefigure some of the possible scenarios."

Don't expect straight answers, however. Mr. Raad, whose day job is as assistant professor of art at Cooper Union in Manhattan, wields every contemporary medium at hand — computer imaging, animation, search engine minutia, photography, film, video and performance — in an effort to comprehend the disorienting, obliterating effects of extreme physical and psychological violence. His art seldom depicts violence head on. He is more interested in visualizing the new structures and new ways of living that violent destruction creates. With humor and erudition he ponders the stories that people tell themselves so that they can go on from there.

The political artists who were celebrated in the 1980's, from Leon Golub to Barbara Kruger, were enraged and on-message. Their spirit is very much alive in "Terrorvision," an exhibition on view at Exit Art through July 31, in which 59 international artists confront the politics and experience of terror, with images that range from photographs of blood-splattered streets to declassified film of nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.

But Mr. Raad belongs to a generation of artists who don't want us to see them fulminate as they confront the big contemporary questions. Some of these artists, including Mr. Raad, are in another politically engaged exhibition, "The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere," on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., through next spring. Such artists tend to go where people are — to universities, theaters, stores and the streets — in an effort to intervene in the processes by which ideas about hot-button issues like globalism, race and war become accepted fact.

Mr. Raad's attitude toward any fact is that it is suspect and inadequate. Newspapers, he says, are distracting in form and content. With ads sprinkled through columns of print, they are too fragmented to transmit the complexity of violence — particularly that of the Lebanese wars, which virtually destroyed Beirut and involved Israel, Syria, Christian and Muslim militias and the United States and the Soviet Union.

Historians, he contends, tend to see events through the filter of their own histories and memories. He adds that, more confounding still, "Today everything is data based, everything is searched, so the artist's job is to become an editor, to establish relationships to all this data that permits others to enter in."

Mr. Raad approaches carnage from an oblique angle. He mixes fiction with fact and arranges it in what are meant to resemble archives. For example, he has created something he calls a foundation, the Atlas Group, whose artistic projects can be seen on the Web at www.theatlasgroup.org .

Until this year, the Atlas Group consisted of Mr. Raad. "It is a foundation in that it imagines the structure of a foundation," he explained, with laughter and intensity, one recent morning in his Cooper Union office. "So the idea is, let's call it a foundation and if we imagine it enough and work on it maybe it will become an actual think tank with collaborators and a building."

This year, the growing scope and fame of his car-bomb project, "My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: A History of Car Bombs in the Lebanese Wars, Volume 1 (21 January 1986)," has attracted two collaborators in Lebanon — Tony Chakar, an architect, and Bilal Khbeiz, a journalist and commentator for The Annahar, a daily newspaper — as well as three of Mr. Raad's Cooper Union students.

The seeds of the car-bombing project are on view at Mass MoCA, as part of Mr. Raad's "Fadl Fakhouri File." The apocryphal Dr. Fakhouri, according to Mr. Raad's written description, was "the foremost historian of the Lebanese wars," whose 226 notebooks and 26 short films were bequeathed upon his death in 1993 to the Atlas Group archives "for analysis, preservation and exhibition."

"Already Been in a Lake of Fire, Notebook No. 38," purports to be one of the only two surviving notebooks, handwritten "in Arabic and/or English, and/or French, and/or German, and/or Latin." In it, Dr. Fakhouri had cut out and pasted photographs of 145 cars that corresponded in make, model and color to every car linked to a bomb during the Lebanese wars. (The number of bombing incidents keeps growing in the Lebanese press, and in Mr. Raad's titles — he is currently up to 3,641.) Mr. Raad creates fictional characters who speak with great authority to persuade their audience that what they report is true.